On paper, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is hard to beat as a contender to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. He’s the popular governor of a crucial swing state just months out from the presidential election.
But there’s a catch: Shapiro doesn’t like the anti-Semitic mobs prowling the streets of his state looking for Jews to intimidate and Jewish-owned shops to vandalize. He also criticized the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Liz Magill, whose failure to condemn the anti-Semitism at her institution led to her resignation. And he opposes the double standards on display in the media and the academy, telling the New York Times in March: “If you had a group of white supremacists camped out and yelling racial slurs every day, that would be met with a different response than antisemites camped out, yelling antisemitic tropes.”
Shapiro is a practicing Jew who went to Jewish day school and even did some Jewish activism as a kid, organizing a letter-writing campaign on behalf of Soviet Jewry. His early activism helped him develop a comfort and skill with public campaigning, which in turn has made him a formidable political figure with crossover appeal in a state whose electoral votes could conceivably decide the presidential race.
By some accounts, he is the frontrunner for Kamala Harris’s veep pick. By all accounts, he is in the top two or three contenders. After all, everyone loves a nice Jewish boy.
Except progressives.
The New Republic says Shapiro’s the one pick who would “fracture” the Democrats’ newfound unity and kill the good vibes they’ve been enjoying since Harris’s anointing. The Democratic Socialists of America warn he’s “not the right man for this job” because he’s “an outspoken supporter of the Zionist project in Palestine.” A staffer for Democratic Rep. Summer Lee—of Shapiro’s home state of Pennsylvania—is one of the organizers of a new online campaign to stop Shapiro’s selection as veep, titled “No Genocide Josh.”
There are one or two other token excuses for progressives hating on Shapiro; he once entertained, then reneged on, a school-choice plan, for example. But the fact that Shapiro dropped it at Democrats’ behest makes it a nonfactor.
Michael Moore claims picking Shapiro is one of the very few ways Harris can lose this election because it could cost her his home state of Michigan. “Shapiro said it’s ‘antisemitic’ for anyone to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel in order to convince them to stop their apartheid behavior,” the agitprop director wrote yesterday. “He also cruelly compared peaceful college students to the Ku Klux Klan because they were calling for an end to the slaughter in Gaza. Actions like these will diminish the Arab American vote for Harris and depress a large swath of the youth vote throughout the country.”
Good luck making that case. Back in the real world, meanwhile, the Arab-American vote in Michigan will not cost Harris the state even if many of these voters are upset with the administration’s opposition to Hamas. The state of Michigan’s electoral votes will not be determined by the war in Gaza.
Moore himself surely knows this, as do the others complaining about Shapiro. And that is why the intra-Democratic argument over Shapiro is so interesting. Harris can pick Shapiro without jeopardizing Michigan. But progressives want to make a stand and demand some sort of buy-in, and this is the issue they’ve chosen. Anti-Zionism is the left flank’s litmus test.
Which has only raised the stakes. Correctly or incorrectly (it’s impossible to know unless and until Harris makes her pick and explains her reasoning), the prospective Shapiro pick is being understood by all sides to mean that if Harris doesn’t pick Shapiro, it will be interpreted as a sop to the left.
That perception only intensified when Shapiro recently joined Harris for a campaign rally in the Philly suburbs. As auditions go, the governor nailed this one. Twitter/X was consumed by the apparent similarities between Shapiro and Barack Obama.
And in fact, Shapiro’s stance on anti-Semitic riots will help, not hurt, Harris. It’s one thing to differ with the base on Israel policy, but it’s quite another for Democrats to risk a replay of the “defund the police” backlash. The pro-Hamas protests are replete with violence, threats of more violence, and anti-American propaganda—which makes sense, considering Iran’s purported role in them, according to the administration’s intelligence agencies. They are not “about Israel”; they are about whether the administration is content to put the public at the mercy of a movement bent on street violence and supported by America’s enemies abroad. The idea that Shapiro’s opposition to mob rule will hurt the ticket more than it will help the ticket is patently absurd, and relies on a startlingly low opinion of Americans.
All of this contributes to the idea that only if Harris is beholden to the progressive base will she pass over Shapiro. Of course, there are all sorts of intangible considerations that go into picking one’s running mate, and it may not be as simple as progressives are making it out to be. But it is impossible to believe Shapiro’s position on the pro-Hamas mobs won’t play a significant role one way or the other, even if it’s not the sole consideration. Harris is being tested by her party’s anti-Zionists right out of the gate. The honeymoon appears to be over.
